The Silence: Part Two of the Further Adventures of Ahsoka Tano
by Nanometer
Summary: A strange void in space thrusts our hero into the midst of an unexpected adventure. The direct sequel to The Vigil: Part One.


A shower of sparks traced a fiery path, arcing through the air before winking out as they alit on the dusky gray deck plating. These were followed shortly by spray after spray of the white hot motes, raining down to fade into invisible dust. Ahsoka sat up slowly from where she had been hunched over the pile of metal parts, the welded seam still glowing from the heat. Easing her back she reached up and pushed her protective face shield to the top of her head, sweat beading at her temples from both her exertion and the heat of the burning gases. She surveyed her work as the kinks in her neck gradually subsided.

On the table in front of her lay a mish-mash of electronic parts, servos, and the sheet metal she'd been working on. Not much to look at in its current state, but she had a vision and the determination to see the job through to completion if at all possible.

Rubbing her sore shoulder muscles with one hand, she put down her torch and cranked closed the fuel supply valve. The whisper of burning gases ceased almost immediately and only the regular vibrations of the hyperspace drive remained to keep her company. A pile of electronic wires and integrated circuitry caught her attention as she started to rise from her chair. Grasping one of the larger chip boards she slumped back down and examined it. Most of the wires were heavily burned, many beyond repair.

'_These will all have to be replaced_,' she thought, absently pulling one of them free. She tossed it into the recycling bin as the metal could still be melted down and repurposed. Grabbing a pair of pliers, she began stripping away all the unusable wires from the board. When she'd finished, she flipped the circuit over and noticed a small plaque obscured by soot and melted wire insulation. Using her thumb she gently brushed away the grime to reveal the shiny metal beneath.

"Astomechanical Service Droid Model R4N9," she read aloud. "Don't worry little guy, I won't give up on you just yet." Ahsoka patted the largest section of the droid's housing affectionately.

Replacing the electronics back in the pile she arose and strode from the cabin. After R4 had sacrificed himself to save the Remnant she had converted one of the ship's empty cabins into a workshop in the hopes of bringing her companion back to life. It had turned out to be an incredibly daunting task and at many points she had thought about giving up and just purchasing a replacement unit, but she persevered determined not to let a little adversity derail her.

The Remnant was Ahsoka's heavily modified YG-class freighter, a combination of salvaged parts as well as hasty repairs that barely resembled the original ship as it had been when it was first built. She was a sturdy ship despite the many mishaps she'd been through and with every new modification the Remnant seemed to take on a little more of Ahsoka's personality.

Things had been quiet in the intervening months since her run-in with her old Master, now the scourge of the galaxy known as Lord Vader. She had barely survived that adventure and had laid low for as long as she could until her dwindling fuel and food supplies had driven her back out into society once more. The first thing she had done before reemerging was to painstakingly scour off the red paint blazoned across the Remnant's hull. Back when she had first purchased the ship she'd wanted to mark it as her own, to make it stand out from the many others of its type she had seen in the used shipyard. It had taken her quite a while to settle on the name 'Remnant', but it seemed fitting as she felt she was all that was left of a bygone time.

Now that the name no longer adorned the hull she almost felt a little guilty, but it was much safer to blend into the crowd since she had the unwanted attention of the New Galactic Empire. So far she had managed to stay out of trouble, avoiding the inner rim systems by only accepting jobs moving freight between outer rim planets. In doing so she had the added benefit of seeing remote parts of the galaxy few people got the opportunity to experience. Just a month ago she had been delivering medical supplies to an outpost on Gamorr and had observed firsthand the vibrant blooming of the Coolsap trees, a process so intense it turned the forests to winter even though sweltering summer ruled all else about them.

Ahsoka plopped heavily into her favorite of the Remnant's two pilot seats, the right hand one with the cracked and worn leather, and it let out a long creak. She surveyed the navigational computer and found the time to destination information in the bottom left corner of the screen.

'_Three hours and fifteen minutes_,' she thought. She was taking the Corellian Trade Spine as far as Hoth, at which point she would be forced to drop out of hyperspace and plot a long sub-light course toward the Fornoth system. Her cargo was a set of three terraforming generators bound for Fornoth Prime, a desolate rock on the outskirts of the galaxy that some optimistic client deemed an untapped resource to be exploited. She'd never been anywhere near this region of space before and was looking forward to exploring the area on her way back.

For now she had calculated the shortest possible route from Hoth, not the path that her client's scouts had taken but a much more direct one through a large region of unknown space. By her rough estimates it should knock off approximately four days from the journey, well over a week round trip. Time was money and she meant to maximize it.

Stretching she stood once more and, checking the readout a final time, walked out of the cockpit. She'd been cooped up in her new workshop for hours and could feel the tension in her leg muscles as she walked.

'_Time for a run_,' she decided and headed toward the cargo bay.

With the countless hours she ended up spending crisscrossing the vastness of space Ahsoka had found she needed some form of exercise to keep both her mind focused and her body primed for action. The short term fix had been to leave an access path around the outside of the cargo bay, ostensibly for easing loading and unloading of goods, but in reality it made a workable path for running. It was mindless tedium at times, but so was pretty much everything to do with deep space shipping. Taking an immediate right as she entered the cargo hold she began jogging the all too familiar path, cleansing and emptying her mind as she did so.

'''''''

Ahsoka sat bolt upright in her captain's chair not realizing until she woke that she'd even drifted off to sleep. She was five days out from Hoth now and deep in unknown territory. Her unexpected nap made her nervous as there was no one else onboard to help guide the ship on such occasions, and though she'd set the nav computer to sound an alarm at approaching course changes or hazards, she was loathe to trust to that technology alone.

Checking her speed and the engine performance for the hundredth time she was relieved to find all well within operational norms. Something was nagging at her though, a sense of dread she could not shake, but the feeling was difficult to nail down and fleeting at the best of times. Perhaps it was just the fading thoughts from a bad dream.

'_Besides_,' she thought, '_what else can I do out her but move onward?_'

Out of habit she pressed the long range sensor activation switch and watched the data stream slowly fill the display. Something odd caught her attention and she focused intently on the readout. Normally even visually empty space was full of background energy readings and tiny specks of ejected stellar material but, if her instruments were to be believed, directly ahead of her current course lay an immense patch of space with absolutely nothing in it.

She reached over and manually recalibrated the sensor array, realizing how much easier this process would be with an astromech droid.

'_Soon, my friend,_' she thought wishing again for the dry companionship of her currently disabled cohort.

When the recalibration was completed she pressed the switch again but the readout still displayed nothing.

"That's impossible." She said to no one in particular.

Grasping the visual display controller with one hand she dialed in the optical telescope on the fast approaching void. A binary system distinctly appeared on the screen and she was further perplexed.

'_A clearly visible star system yet it doesn't appear on the sensors?_' she thought, her interest truly piqued.

She watched carefully as the void on her screen crept ever nearer, the sense of foreboding urgently returning. She was half a second from changing course when suddenly all her screens scrambled and went blank. Almost simultaneously all of the lights flickered out and the steady rush of air through the venting ceased as well. Abrupt and total blackness reigned throughout the cockpit and worst of all, silence from the aft of the Remnant, a clear indication that the engines were no longer functioning.

To add to the sudden loss of power, Ahsoka now found herself floating out of the pilot's seat, the artificial gravity having quit as well.

"Anything else want to fail?" she said to the darkness. It sounded lighthearted but she was repressing the panic that was urgently rising in her mind.

The only light still visible was coming through the Remnant's cockpit windows from the distant binary star, but it was much too far away to provide any real useful light. Mostly from memory, Ahsoka reached up to the ceiling console and flicked the engine startup switches a few times with no luck.

'_Has to be the power grid…_' she thought, but realized that wouldn't account for the engines cutting out.

The Remnant was equipped with redundant power supply systems and battery backups to keep just this type of thing from occurring and Ahsoka was at a loss as to why all the ship's fail-safes would malfunction simultaneously.

'_First things first._' She reached under her seat and pried loose the emergency flashlight, a ponderous thing that was basically useless for anything but shining light in your eyes. But when she found and pressed the power switch the bulb inside barely glowed for a second before fading back to utter darkness.

"Ok, this is getting ridiculous!" she said to the inky void of the cabin.

Pushing off from the chair she cruised effortlessly over toward the doorway, hand outstretched in front of her to keep from hitting anything unseen. Her hand came up against the cool surface of the bulkhead and, tracing the wall, she found the manual door release lever and pulled it. She left the doorway open and pulled herself onward to the first door on the left of the Remnant's crew quarters deck, the captain's cabin. Repeating the process with the manual lever she slid into her sleeping quarters and felt her way over to the gigantic metal-top desk that dominated the space.

Ahsoka was about to start feeling around on the desk for her lightsaber when it promptly banged into her forehead and spiraled weightlessly away. Using the Force she quickly located it and brought it flying back into her open palm. With practiced ease she activated it, but instead of the crackling blue light that always appeared, only a faint blue light now danced wisp-like from the blade's emitter.

Perplexed, she snapped it closed and open once more, but there was no change in the lightsaber's function. While activated, the normally bright concentrated blade now was nothing more than a loose coalescence of hazy light. It also appeared to be dispersing around the tip and faintly streaming away to her left toward the outer hull of the ship. She held the lightsaber up and shook it a few times for good measure, but was unable to alter its current state.

At least she had a little bit of light now and she used this to float her way back to the engine room. With no windows back here the pitiful light of her malfunctioning lightsaber was all that she had, but it was enough for her to see that all the batteries were drained completely.

Something in this region of space had managed to drain almost every ounce of electrical energy out of the Remnant and, as she stared at the thin light still streaming away from her lightsaber, still was actively at work.

Repressing her panic once more she headed back to the bridge to further ascertain the situation the power drain was having on her ship. She didn't know quite why, but she felt this was where she needed to be. Looking out of the view port she could still see the binary star system, but it had shifted to port now, no longer dead ahead as it had been when she'd entered this strangely void region.

'_Our course has been altered_,' she thought looking intently at the stars through the window.

Only planetary gravity or a tractor beam would be able to exert such a force at this distance, but she had no sensors and thus no means to determine what was causing the course change.

'_I've got to get power back to the ship_,' she thought, '_but how_?'

The Remnant's reactors were currently silent and would not restart without a source of power normally supplied by the ship's ample battery banks, now completely useless. She was still scouring her mind for any possible idea when an ominous thud echoed throughout the hull. Ahsoka pulled herself forward to the viewport windows see what might have impacted the hull but all too soon the reason for the sound swung into view.

Cruising slowly over the top of the Remnant was the outline of a torpedo-shaped ship, its hull peppered by dim lights. More impressive was the vast network of fabric or thin metal that billowed taut between evenly spaced poles jutting up from the vessel's main hull. The whole conglomeration looked like two oversized Nabanesse sailing ships fastened together at their decks with sails and masts facing out in opposite directions.

'_A solar sailer?_'

She didn't have long to ponder the significance as a tow cable came into view while the ship passed further beyond her. The stars rotated as the slack in the line pulled tight and the Remnant began to be towed, where too she couldn't guess.

It wouldn't really matter in a few hours anyway, without life support the air would be getting thin and the temperature would be well below freezing.

'Pirates…' she thought.

It would be an easy living picking up the flotsam that washed into this dead region of space if you could somehow manage to survive here. It was obviously possible since her current captors were able to move about, albeit slowly. And from the lighting it seemed possible to maintain power too.

She reached up and flipped the engine startup switches impotently once more. This was not how she had envisioned her day going at all. The air was getting increasingly cold and she shivered involuntarily.

Ahsoka pulled herself along the ceiling to the open cabin door and through it back into the Remnant's central hallway. She cruised past the cabins now barely illuminated by the weak light of her lightsaber. When she reached the port airlock she stopped at a large locker bolted to the wall and opened it. Inside were two nearly brand new environmental suits that she had purchased after her old facemask had been damaged beyond repair. She donned one now and pressed the power switch located on the arm band. Nothing happened.

She hadn't been too hopeful the batteries would work as nothing else currently did.

'_Five minutes, tops_.' She thought, estimating the amount of air the suit would hold without the carbon dioxide scrubbers and the oxygen infusers functioning. '_That better be enough to get me into that ship_.'

Swinging the bulkhead inner airlock door closed behind her, Ahsoka eased her way to the outer hatch. She waited until the last possible moment to put the helmet in place and locked the neck seals closed. Without hesitating she immediately spun the depressurization valve and listened to the slowly diminishing rush of escaping air. She started cranking the outer hatch release before equilibrium was reached and had to wait much longer than felt comfortable before the hatchway door would finally swing inward. With a firm grip on the Remnant's hull, Ahsoka swung out of the ship and into open space.

The lack of friction and gravity made navigating the Remnant's outer hull relatively easy for Ahsoka. In no time she located where the grappling hook from the unknown vessel had latched on, crushing part of the long range communications relay when it had impacted. Her critical eye was already filing away the necessary repairs for later as she reached out and grasped the tow cable in her left hand. Part of her wanted to see if she could simply free the Remnant by slicing the cable away, but even if her lightsaber were functioning properly that would only have served to put her back where she started while also losing her apparent element of surprise.

Instead, she began climbing along the cable, hand over hand. The distance did not appear far but when she was only half way across she could feel her breathing rate increasing as her body tried to compensate for the diminishing oxygen levels. Despite the need to rush she took a very brief moment to look back at the Remnant below her, cruising at an odd angle as it was being pulled along.

'_I'll be back soon_,' she thought resuming her course toward the vessel above.

She was passing the outermost layers of the unknown ship's solar sails now and the effect up close was incredible. Solar sailing vessels were nothing more than novelties in the inner rim, being incredibly slow compared to conventional spacefaring ships. The only time she'd ever seen one before was during a festival near Coruscant years ago and she had not had the opportunity to see the vessel up close then. Now being amidst the sails while underway made her smile despite her current predicament. A delicate wave silently rippled along the nearest sail until it reached the edge and dissipated into nothingness.

Ahsoka's was finding it hard to concentrate when she finally reached the surface of the other vessel. Time was running out and she hadn't located an entry point yet. Frantically she scanned the hull around her and located what appeared to be an access hatch nearby. Without hesitating she made for it. Dark clouds were forming at the edges of her vision now, steadily growing and closing off what little light she could still see, yet she made it to the hatch and found the well-marked emergency release handle.

Try as she might the handle just wouldn't budge. No matter which way she pulled or pushed the lever would not give. She looked around again for anything to help pry or force open the unforgiving entry, but there was nothing nearby.

The end was closing in now and though her chest heaved there simply wasn't any new oxygen to be had. She resisted the incredibly powerful urge to tear off the helmet knowing there was even less air outside the suit. As the last threads of consciousness fled she cursed the EV suit and slammed a fast weakening fist onto the hatch a final time.

Ahsoka's arm slid lifelessly off of the unchanged entryway that almost seemed to gloat at her in its impenetrability. As her wrist slid uselessly away from the hull, a support line for the nearest sail brushed her EV suit's power switch and, with a flicker, a bank of lights awoke.


End file.
